THE SOCIAL REFORMER 25 



wickedness was awake, lay resting all around throughout 

 the quiet miles of streets, recuperating its strength for the 

 duties of the morrow. And not less impressive was the 

 completeness of the control of the city authorities over 

 these evil centres. The officers of the law and the crimi- 

 nals knew each other as familiarly as opponents in a game 

 of chess, and were on not less friendly terms. And the 

 rules of the game were thoroughly understood on both 

 sides. There were some evils for which the law had little 

 remedy ; but in almost every case these were evils for 

 which legal coercion was not the proper method, or in 

 which the crude powers of legal justice could not be 

 applied without invading legitimate rights and endanger- 

 ing the public welfare in wider ways. The law seemed 

 to me to have crept in after vice into every crevice, and 

 to press upon it constantly on all sides, like the waters of 

 the sea on an indented shore. I came away with my mind 

 filled with the sense of the vastness of the wise labour of 

 good men during many generations, devoted in unob- 

 trusive ways to the social service. And there seemed to 

 me to be very little room for the mere innovator. 



Now, I am not prepared to say the same of all the 

 aspects of our social life. Crime is a direct menace to 

 society and a direct challenge to its forces ,- and, on the 

 whole, society has learnt how to protect itself against it. 

 But the misery that comes from sheer misfortune and 

 incompetence, from the personal feebleness that lacks the 

 energy which goes to crime is a more insidious evil. The 

 problem of the outcast poor, of the occasionally innocent 

 and always helpless victims of a society that is not cleansed 

 of the methods of barbarism, is far larger and more diffi- 

 cult ; and the same serious and systematic thought has 



